


By The Sun

by l_cloudy



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: AO3 1 Million, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 14:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1188378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l_cloudy/pseuds/l_cloudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elia Martell runs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By The Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Because I realized I haven't written any Elia yet. Experienting with writing style, tenses and characterization, un beta'd and written in one hour, not to be taken too seriously.  
> Set to [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtx0AvGAlw).

**now**

The day Gregor Clegane makes his way through Elia’s apartments, steel in hand, the light shines bright through the windows.

It would be easier if it were night, she decides, wincing as the screams grow closer. The sun makes it so much harder to hide. Next to her, the babe cries in his crib, and Elia closes her eyes and prays.

**then**

She is twenty-one years old when she marries Rhaegar Targaryen, and a woman for nine. Other women her age have been married for almost as long; had children, saw them learn to walk and talk, and sometimes even die.

Some of these women are dead themselves; Elia’s life is only just beginning.

Or so her mother tells her on the morning of her wedding, one hand smoothing down Elia’s dress, and she only smiles and doesn’t roll her eyes because she knows that her mother means well.

Her gown is a bright gold, like the sun. Elia likes bright colors, and it goes oh-so-well with her cloaks. Both of them; her old one, and her new husband’s, black-and-red. Oberyn doesn’t like the dress, saying it’s too demure, but he seem to love the bridal cloak.

 _“_ It makes you look so… innocent”, he says, trailing one hand down the length of the cloth; and Elia has to glare at him to make him stop talking, because the walls have ears and she doesn’t need gossip, because King’s Landing is not home.

She’s never going home again.

**now**

Elia still loves bright colors, and light and warmth and the kiss of the sun on her skin, in the same way Rhaegar loves his twilights and dawns and the crackling of the fire.

After Aerys, Elia _hates_ fire.

She loves daylight; nothing bad ever happens when the sun is up. Days are _safe_ , and now Gregor Clegane is busting down the doors to her bedchamber.

In another life, Elia screams.

**then**

Her mother leaves after the wedding and so does Oberyn, after a while; and Elia thanks the gods every day for Ashara because without her she would be truly, completely alone.

Sure, there’s her Uncle Lewyn, too, and Arthur, but they are not _hers_. They are Aerys’s, and, for this reason only, Elia knows she will never trust them.

Rhaegar is another thing, a _different_ thing. He’s as handsome as they say, kind and gentle and attentive when the occasion calls for it, and Elia thinks herself lucky enough. She does not love him, and doesn’t know him enough to like him, or even to befriend him.

But Elia Martell is not lonely. Doing so would be a defeat, she decides, thinking back to Princess Myriah and her Targaryen prince, to that painting of Daenerys that Mother likes so much. Strong women in a foreign world; and they adapted, they _thrived_.

There’s no reason why she cannot do the same.

**now**

In another life, Elia screams. Not at first, not when the doors shatter, not when Clegane knocks her down on the bed with a backhanded slap that leaves her head spinning, not even when he draws his sword out of the scabbard. She is a Princess of Dorne, a Martell of Sunspear, and she doesn’t scream

But then he goes to the crib to Aegon, so tiny in those enormous hands, and _squeezes_.

Now, _this_ is when Elia Martell screams.

**then**

Elia entertains the ladies of the court, and befriends none.

They go riding and walking and hawking together, no matter that those days leave her tired to the bone; and Elia smiles at all of them and makes polite conversation, even when she knows they’re calling her the Dornish slut behind her back.

Ashara is furious when she tells Elia of the whispers, the endless speculations on the many lovers she must have taken behind the Prince’s back. Elia is more sad than furious, and it would not do, so she laughs.

“What would I need a lover for?” she asks her friend, “when I have such a dashing man of my own?” Her husband is as intense in his marital duties as he is in everything else, which would be enjoyable if their relationship weren’t so cold. Still, Elia figures that the good outweighs the bad, and she has Ashara spread some gossip of her own.

The next rumor has her brewing love potions; and, this time, Ashara is the one to laugh.

**now**

But that’s another life.

**then**

Aerys is as crazy as they say, Elia learns very early on, one time that he lashes at her for wearing a dress he deems inappropriate. He screams and spits in her face when he moves closer, and she can see the red in his eyes and the foam at the corners of his mouth.

The queen does nothing and the Kingsguard does nothing, and Rhaegar has to come physically between the two of them. Elia hates it.

“What if you weren’t there?” she asks him later, once he’s apologized on his father’s behalf as if the King should care. Elia has seen the marks on Queen Rhaella’s arms, once, even though it’s apparently good courtly manners to pretend not no.

“If he ever strikes me”, Elia tells him, calmly, “I’ll hit him back.”

It’s a good thing he doesn’t protest, because then she’d hit him, too; but his quietness only makes her want to scream. _Why do you stand there and do nothing?_ she wants to ask him, _why do you let him do those things?_

**now**

Here Elia barely spares a thought for the babe who wasn't Aegon, the blonde nameless boy she had Varys bring her. Here Elia has a knife, and she throws herself at Clegane, hands searching for his neck, and she stabs him. And again, and again.

The man is eight feet tall, and probably barely hears the sting of the dagger.

But Elia Martell is the Red Viper’s sister, and that particular poison she’s coated the blade with only takes five heartbeats to paralyze, and thirty to kill.

Gregor Clegane resist for ten, then falls.

**then**

The king is as crazy as they say and, sometimes, Elia thinks that she has more fire in her than her Rhaegar  does.

She learns better on the day her first child is born, and he names her Rhaenys.

Her husband, Elia learns, is madder than the King.

He’s just better at hiding it.

**now**

Rhaenys is in Rhaegar’s rooms, because Varys figured that no one would think of looking there.

And they didn’t; not at first, because the first man is only now entering by the time Elia runs through the door.

He stares at her surprised, eyes darting from her face to her bloodied clothes, to the dagger in her hand.

 _Well_ , she tells herself, _I suppose I must look a mess_.

And then the other man dies, too.

**then**

Her husband is madder than the King, but he’s still a good man, and gentle, and terribly dull.

Elia doesn’t particularly mind.

She can live with it.

**now**

Varys doesn’t come to her and so she does, smashing through the wooden panels she know hide the secret passageway, hoping she’d remember the way.

It would take only one more man to enter Rhaegar’s room to find the entrance, and she doesn’t know how long the locked door will hold.

Once again, she wishes it were night. It’s so much easier to hide things at night, to hide away; she’s grown used to it. Aerys had his burnings at all the hours of the day, but it was always dark in the Throne room, completely dark but for the fire. Darkness was for monsters, Elia used to think, and daylight was safe.

Now the sun shines bright on King’s Landing as men fight and die, and the blood runs red.

**then**

The Stark girl is ten years younger than she is, and Elia wonders whether she should feel jealous.

She is angry at the slight, but not as much as many others are. She has been insulted her whole life, and doesn’t much care for Rhaegar anyway.

The tourney will be over in two days, and then they will go back to King’s Landing. It’s still not home; but Rhaenys will be waiting for her, and that’s enough.

**now**

She finds Varys, finally, and he tells her that the king is dead.

“Lord Tywin has taken the city,” he says. “He’d jump at the opportunity of being King’s Hand, instead of Robert taking the throne. If you –”

“No,” Elia tells him, surprised of how stern she sounds. She feels as though she might be on the blink of tears.

Tywin Lannister sent his men to kill my children, she thinks but doesn’t say, feeling the weight of the words in her mind.

“I’m going home,” it’s all she says.

**then**

He names their son Aegon and tells her that the dragon has two heads.

The Grand Maester explains that she will never have other children for as long as she lives, but she and Rhaegar both know that he’s Lord Tywin’s man and only hopes that her husband will set her aside for Cersei Lannister. She can have more children, she almost does.

But Elia doesn’t want to die, and doesn’t share her husband’s foolish dreams.

She drowns Rhaegar’s precious Visenya with moon’s tea, and lives another day for the children  she already has.

**now**

The sun is finally setting on King’s Landing when Tywin Lannister makes his way through Maegor’s Holdfast, like Gregor Clegane did.

Elia Martell is not there, not anymore.

 


End file.
